Grant Moves South (35 page)

Grant went first to W. H. L. Wallace, commanding what was supposed to be the reserve division, and got from him a sketchy picture of what had happened so far.

At dawn, the Union Army had been grouped loosely in preparation for a march on Corinth. Up in front, nearest the Confederates, were the divisions of Sherman and Prentiss, with McClernand's and Hurlbut's divisions lined up back of them and Wallace's division in the rear. At three in the morning, Prentiss—no professional, but a stout fighter with combat experience in the Mexican War—had sent three companies from the 25th Missouri out on a long reconnaissance. These soldiers, groping past the Federal picket line, and drifting to the right, in front of Sherman's division, had bumped into Confederate skirmishers at five o'clock, or thereabouts. They had attacked at once, and before long Prentiss had sent other Missourians forward to support them. Meanwhile, Sherman's 77th Ohio had also gone forward on the prowl, and it too had kicked up a fight with unidentified Rebels in the murky woodlands.
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(One of the many oddities about this battle was that it began with Federals attacking Confederates.) The advance elements had fought hard for a short time, and then the Confederate offensive had begun to roll, and ever since then the men in blue had tried desperately to hold on to what they had.

Sherman was on the right. Prentiss was to his left, not in immediate contact, and isolated on Prentiss's left was a lone brigade from Sherman's division, three Midwestern regiments under Colonel David
Stuart. Albert Sidney Johnston was attacking with his entire army, less three brigades held back as reserve, an army massed in three consecutive battle lines, each line following closely behind the one ahead; a defective tactical arrangement, because it meant that Confederate troops would be hopelessly scrambled, once the fighting became intimate, but a powerhouse nonetheless, because it put more than thirty thousand men in a broad mass to attack little more than a third of their own number.

Sherman's men got it first. Unluckiest of all the new regiments, on a day when everybody's luck was bad, was the 53rd Ohio. It got into line, fired two volleys, then heard its colonel howl: “Fall back and save yourselves!” The Colonel ran for the rear and cowered behind a log, white-faced; two companies of the 53rd stayed and fought and the rest lit out for the steamboat landing. By the end of the day, scattered portions of this regiment were fighting in three separate Union regiments. The 71st Ohio also lost its colonel, who spurred his horse for the rear the moment the fighting began. In the confusion that followed, the 71st was hit hard by an Alabama regiment and fled in a wild, disorganized stampede. The 6th Iowa, doing its best in its first fight, found that its colonel was drunk. He tried to put the regiment through pointless, impossible maneuvers in the face of a Confederate attack, and was placed under arrest by the brigade commander. (Growing sober a bit later, he took a musket and fought in the ranks of some other regiment as a private soldier.)
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Sherman's division was driven back and so was Prentiss's, and when McClernand and Hurlbut got their men in beside them the Confederate attack seemed to increase in intensity. One of McClernand's brigadiers said later that his troops lost more men in their first five minutes of action than in all the rest of the day.
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Now Wallace's troops were going into action, and by 10 in the morning practically all of Grant's army was strung out in a loose uneven front, fighting desperately.

Grant went on to see the other divisional commanders. Iowa soldiers in Hurlbut's division saw him riding up, attended by two or three staff officers. He was wearing a sword, today, and a buff sash; one officer said Grant's face “wore an anxious look, yet bore no evidence of excitement or trepidation,” and he trotted forward with a leisurely air. Another soldier said Grant was smoking a cigar,
seemingly as cool as if he were making a routine inspection, and he believed that the sight reassured the men, who felt that the worst must be over.
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Grant visited Sherman briefly. Sherman's horse had been shot, he had a minor wound in one hand, he was covered with dust, and his tie had worked around to the side so that it stuck out under one ear; but this man who had been so nervous in the early days at Kentucky that he lost his command and was called insane was cool and at his ease in the heat of actual battle, and when Grant asked how things were going Sherman said the situation was not too bad, except that he did need more ammunition. Grant told him arrangements for ammunition had already been made, and cantered off to see Prentiss. When he wrote of the battle, long afterward, Grant remarked that on this first day at Shiloh “I never deemed it important to stay long with Sherman.”
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The intimacy that would bind these two men together all the rest of the war was born this day at Shiloh.

Prentiss had been driven back into an eroded lane that ran parallel with the Confederate front, with a stretch of woodland behind it and a nondescript field overgrown with brambles out in front, and here his raw troops were making a determined stand. W. H. L. Wallace and most of his division joined them here, now or a little later, and the resistance these soldiers put up was so effective that the Confederates were held at bay for five or six hours; they referred to this section, ever after, as the hornets' nest. Grant told Prentiss to hold his ground at all hazards—an order which Prentiss would obey with dogged fidelity—and cantered off. As Grant and his escort rode past the 5th Ohio battery, the captain of the battery saw his own father riding along as a member of Grant's cavalry escort.
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Off to the right and rear there was an important bridge, where a road that passed the rear of the Federal position crossed Owl Creek and went north to Crump's Landing. Here Grant found a cavalry detachment and two regiments of infantry. He posted the infantry to hold the bridge, and sent a cavalry officer with a company of cavalry to ride to Crump's Landing and guide Lew Wallace's division to the field.
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Then he wrote a note to Buell and gave it to a staff officer to take to Savannah. It was an anxious appeal not unlike the one he had sent to Foote during the crisis at Fort Donelson:

The attack on my forces has been very spirited from early this morning. The appearance of fresh troops on the field now would have a powerful effect both by inspiring our men and disheartening the enemy. If you can get upon the field, leaving all your baggage on the east bank of the river, it will be a move to our advantage and possibly save the day to us. The rebel force is estimated at over 100,000 men. [The fury and effectiveness of the Confederate attack apparently had made a great impression on Grant; not often did he so greatly overestimate the forces against him.] My headquarters will be in the log building on top of the hill, where you will be furnished a staff officer to guide you to your place on the field.

Still uncertain whether Buell was actually at Savannah, Grant addressed the dispatch to
Comdg Officer Advance Forces Near Pittsburg, Tenn.
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At some time in the middle of the morning, Rawlins and a lieutenant colonel in the paymaster's department rode up from the landing to find Grant. They did not know exactly where he was, but Rawlins confidently told his comrade, “We'll find him where the firing is heaviest.” The firing, as the paymaster remembered it, was extremely heavy. As they trotted up a forest lane he heard a steady pattering in the leaves overhead, and asked Rawlins if it was raining. Rawlins replied: “Those are bullets, Douglas.” (An Iowa soldier wrote that at one time this morning he saw what he never saw before or afterward—swarms of musket bullets in flight, overhead, visible like buzzing insects.) They found Grant, as Rawlins had predicted, in the thick of things, and both Rawlins and McPherson urged Grant not to expose himself so much; Grant replied that he had to see and know what was going on.
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Once Grant and his staff drew up in an open space, while Grant studied the situation. The fire was heavy, and Captain Hillyer, who never pretended to be the stoical military type, confessed that he and most of the others were in an agony of apprehension. Grant seemed almost to enjoy it, as a man might enjoy being out in the rain on a hot day. One staff officer nudged Hillyer and begged: “Go tell the Old Man to leave here, for God's sake!” Hillyer shook his head: “Tell him yourself. He'll think me afraid, and so I am, but he shan't think so.” At last someone mustered the nerve to ride up and tell Grant: “General, we must leave this place. It isn't necessary to stay here. If we do we shall all be dead in five minutes.” Grant looked about him, muttered, “I guess that's so,” and led the cavalcade away.
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Now and then there would be a brief lull somewhere along the front, but these breathing spells never lasted long or spread all along the line. Morning wore away, and afternoon came, and the fight went on unabated. The tough knot of resistance at the hornets' nest remained, despite repeated Confederate attacks, but elsewhere the Union lines were crowded back steadily; by the day's end, McClernand noted that his division had occupied eight separate battle lines between dawn and dusk.
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Beaten men kept drifting to the rear, and when they met fresh troops coming up they would cry that their regiments had been destroyed and that this was the Bull Run story all over again. One regiment that was moving toward the firing line passed the 41st Illinois, which had been badly shot up, and the Illinois colonel called out to the new troops: “Fill your canteens. Some of you will be in hell before night and you'll need water.” A battery in Sherman's division had to limber up and retreat in a hurry, and one gun, swinging around, locked itself around a green tree, the trunk jammed in hard between wheel and gunbarrel. All the gunners fled, on foot, except for the drivers who rode the six horses attached to the gun; these, lying flat on the animals' necks, too frightened even to look around, flogged their steeds unmercifully, and the poor beasts bucked and pawed the ground and did their unavailing best to gallop; and other soldiers, themselves beset by panic fear, looked on and howled with sudden laughter at the sight. Cannoneers from some other battery at last came over and got the gun clear. Stuart's brigade, almost isolated at the extreme left, broke and fell back, and as men from the 55th Illinois fled up a narrow ravine the advancing Confederates overtook them, lined both sides of the ravine and shot as fast as they could load and fire. A survivor of this unhappy regiment wrote that the Confederates were right on top of them—“It was like shooting into a flock of sheep”—and a Mississippi major who had had part in the assault reflected afterward: “I never saw such cruel work during the war.”
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In the mad violence of battle, bizarre things happened. Many men ran from Prentiss's line in the hornets' nest; some of them, regaining
a little nerve, crept back to the fight, and the boldest took place behind a stout tree on the firing line. Others followed him, and in no time a grotesque tail of thirty or forty men, each clutching the waist of the man in the front of him, swayed out behind that tree, while a distracted company officer, unable to control either himself or his men, paced insanely back and forth from end to end of this line. In W. H. L. Wallace's division, six men were lined up in single file behind one six-inch sapling, each one firing past the ones in front of him, the blast from their muskets scorching and almost deafening the man at the head of the line.
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A sixty-year-old private in the 9th Illinois refused to retreat when his regiment went to the rear, falling in with another unit and fighting there, doing the same when this regiment fell back; that evening, rejoining his comrades, he displayed notes signed by several captains and one colonel, certifying that he had been fighting and not straggling. A six-gun Ohio battery galloped bravely to the front in Hurlbut's division, and halted abruptly when a Rebel shell blew up a caisson; in the next few seconds every man in the battery ran for the rear, leaving guns, limbers and plunging horses quite unattended. Amid heavy fighting, an Iowa private, told that his brother had been killed, asked: “Where is he?” A comrade pointed to the body, which lay not far away. The Iowan, who had been in the act of loading, walked over, musket-muzzle in one hand, ramrod in the other. He bent, saw that his brother was dead, then put the butt of the musket beside the dead man's head, finished loading, and fired. He stayed there as long as his regiment held its position, loading and firing beside his brother's body. One soldier saw a comrade, hit by a bullet that did not even break his skin, fall to the ground and writhe in wild agony, grasping at leaves and sticks with frantic hands; and he realized that a thing he had been told by a veteran was true—that a spent bullet could cause more immediate pain than a serious wound.
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